It was just a blurb on a news Web site, one of those quick hits with what is known as “teaser copy”—a few words designed to get you to click and read the full story.

The teaser copy led the reader to a story about a study that showed that productivity in the workplace can be improved by a 30-minute nap during the day. But it wasn’t the content of the story that should be of interest to those in sleep medicine, it should be the fact that the story was posted at all.

The presence of that story and the now-constant barrage of sleep-related information received by consumers (aka prospective patients) are reaching a fever pitch.

An analysis last fall by the market research company Frost & Sullivan noted that the total market revenue from sleep providers is expected to reach $4.4 billion by 2011, nearly triple the revenue posted in 2004.

Steve Smith

Part of that growth will be fueled by an increase in the reporting of sleep disorders by primary care physicians (PCPs) and others in a position to diagnose patients. In another recent report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled “Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem,” the authors noted that:

  • less than 20% of patients with sleep apnea are appropriately diagnosed, and
  • the current number of polysomnograms performed each year may represent only 20% to 25% of the number required to address public health needs.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

But as with any burgeoning market, every opportunity is often accompanied by an equally important challenge. For both independent and hospital-based sleep centers, the opportunity is obvious: The market is healthy and growing. The challenge will be to enter an already crowded advertising and marketing field, one filled with pitches for clothes and cars, and emerge with a healthy return on an investment.

The field many of them are choosing to enter is “direct-to-consumer,” or D2C, that is, making an appeal directly to the prospective patient, with or without an accompanying professional referral marketing program.

NAVIGATING THE D2C WATERS

Thanks to the increased publicity on the benefits of a good night’s sleep and the negative consequences of sleep disorders, sleep practices will not have to work as hard to convince prospective patients that their products and services are worthwhile.

Still, the effort must be focused and coordinated. External advertising and marketing target patients through a variety of media, including:

  • newspaper ads
  • magazine ads
  • inserts (fliers)
  • radio
  • television
  • direct mail
  • Internet marketing (Web site, e-newsletter, e-mail announcements)
  • signage (office sign, billboards)

External marketing is split into two categories, message development and message delivery. Message development is the creation and investment of your message. Message delivery is the pattern and investment of sending your message so that it reaches the right people at the right time.

D2C MARKETING DO’S AND DON’TS

For new entrants into the consumer-direct arena, and even for some veterans, there are certain guidelines that can help reduce the risk of a low response:

  1. Make sure your message addresses the consumer’s needs, not your own. The temptation is to want to tell Mrs Jones all about your wonderful practice, about your nice facility, your vast experience, and your up-to-date equipment. But you will not get her attention unless you answer the question she is asking, namely, “What’s in it for me?” Tell her how she will benefit by contacting you and you win.
  2. Make it easy for Mrs. Jones to do business with you. Do you accept and file insurance? Do you have free parking or a handicapped-friendly facility? Do you accept credit cards? Are your office hours in sync with work and shopping habits in your area? These are the types of features that will help your prospective patient make a decision in your favor, so make sure she knows. Often, these features are of equal or greater importance than your years in business.
  3. Alert your staff to your external marketing push. In sleep practices that are primarily professional-referral-based, the patients and staff who call for appointments are already predisposed to liking and trusting you. That is because they either have been working with you (office staff) or have been referred to you by a physician they trust (patients).
    However, with external marketing, your staff is likely to encounter more people who do not know you, and, as a result, they are likely to ask more probing “shopper” questions. Your staff should be advised to have more patience with these contacts.
  4. Target your message. If you analyze your patients over the past year and find that 80% are male and/or that 80% of them are blue-collar workers, for example, your message should appear in places where they are likely to see it. In the above scenario, for example, a full-page ad in the regional edition of Architectural Digest, regardless of the wonderful price the Digest sales staff quoted you, is probably a waste of time and money.
  5. Personalize your message. Studies show that the consumer is more likely to respond to a marketing or advertising message that comes from a person, not a place. Pick someone in the practice to be the spokesperson or go-to person and create messages that come from them.
  6. Show results. To make potential patients respond to your marketing efforts, include words and/or pictures from current patients who have had good results and are willing to let you use their stories. Having Mrs Smith’s picture with the words “Acme Sleep gave me my first restful night in 15 years!” is a lot more believable than saying, “We treat sleep disorders.”
  7. Consider using a professional media buyer. A professional media buyer is not just for major corporations. If your goals are long-term, and if you plan on advertising or marketing in multiple magazines, newspapers, etc, you may want to consider hiring an expert to help you sort it all out. Typically, this person works on commission from the media placement sources, but that investment is offset by the lower message delivery rates they have negotiated in advance.
  8. Don’t knock your competition. You may have every reason to believe that your practice is superior to anyone else’s. You may even have the revenue, patient count, patient satisfaction reports, and other data to prove it. But the line you should not cross is mentioning competitors by name or telling Mrs Jones that you are better, even if you don’t name names. There are two key reasons for this. First, you may start a marketing war that you could lose. Second, you may alert your prospective patient to options she did not know she had.

MARKETING PLAN VS RANDOM ACTIVITY

When you see a new patient on an initial examination or interview, you are receiving information, both on your own and from the patient. That information is used to develop a treatment plan, based on either your past experience with similar cases or proper health care protocol or both. You would not proceed without a treatment plan, and your marketing is no different, particularly since you may be undertaking the more complex task of appealing directly to consumers.

Just like that treatment plan, your direct-to-consumer plan must follow a logical sequence of events to replace the random activity that may be your current marketing efforts. A healthy marketing plan is created in four stages:

  1. Testing. This is not or should not be as experimental as it sounds. When you try out a D2C ad, for example, you can use time-tested approaches to message development. The variable then emerges in message delivery. Which phone book(s), for example? Which section(s)? What size? Do I use color? While the full impact of a phone book appeal may take a year to measure, other print media will provide a faster analysis of your efforts.
  2. Tracking. Once your advertising or marketing campaign has begun, it is imperative that your staff begin to track the source of all new patients. Without this tracking in place, you will never know what is working and what is not, and thus you will never know where to reinvest your marketing dollars.
  3. Adjusting. Typically, an ad has to run multiple times for it to succeed. This is because it has to be allowed to create a certain number of impressions on prospective patients before they may act on that information. A Web site has an even longer life cycle. Not all ads or Web sites will be winners. However, some may need only minor changes in order to lift the response. These adjustments should be made after the ad has run three times and if the response thus far is below established expectations.
  4. Evaluate. Did you get a decent return on your investment? Did you manage to execute this campaign without major disruption to your office environment? Perhaps most important, were you able to witness any increase in your reputation, or has advertising and marketing hurt your image?

Want more information? Search Sleep Review’s online archives for sleep laboratory marketing.

  

Consumer-direct marketing is part art and part science, and it is becoming almost mandatory. As the sleep industry continues to grow and more and more consumers drive the market, there will eventually develop a “noise level” that will benefit your practice.

At this time, the noise level is being driven by news stories such as the online story described at the beginning of this article. To help ensure that you are a driver in your practice and not a passenger, take a proactive approach to your D2C marketing.

Steve Smith is the vice president of marketing for Practice Builders, a leading private-practice health care marketing firm in Orange, Calif. He can be reached at (714) 200-2012 or via e-mail at .